Digital Healthcare-Associated Infection: A Case Study on the Security of a Major Multi-Campus Hospital System

Abstract

Modern hospital systems are complex environments that rely on high interconnectivity with the larger Internet. With this connectivity comes a vast attack surface. Security researchers have expended considerable effort to characterize the risks posed to medical devices (e.g., pacemakers and insulin pumps). However, there has been no systematic, ecosystem-wide analyses of a modern hospital system to date, perhaps due to the challenges of collecting and analyzing sensitive healthcare data. Hospital traffic requires special considerations because healthcare data may contain private information or may come from safety-critical devices in charge of patient care. We describe the process of obtaining the network data in a safe and ethical manner in order to help expand future research in this field. We present an analysis of network-enabled devices connected to the hospital used for its daily operations without posing any harm to the hospital’s environment. We perform a Digital Healthcare-Associated Infection (D-HAI) analysis of the hospital ecosystem, assessing a major multi-campus healthcare system over a period of six months. As part of the D-HAI analysis, we characterize DNS requests and TLS/SSL communications to better understand the threats faced within the hospital environment without disturbing the operational network. Contrary to past assumptions, we find that medical devices have minimal exposure to the external Internet, but that medical support devices (e.g., servers, computer terminals) essential for daily hospital operations are much more exposed. While much of this communication appears to be benign, we discover evidence of insecure and broken cryptography and misconfigured devices, and potential botnet activity. Analyzing the network ecosystem in which they operate gives us an insight into the weaknesses and misconfigurations hospitals need to address to ensure the safety and privacy of patients.